PressPause

Let’s make games together.

It’s no secret that I’ve loved the world of games all my life. I’ve even covered them professionally, with contributions to Wired‘s Game|Life, Kotaku, and 1UP, as well as my work with Brian Ashcraft on theArcade Mania book, about Japanese game centers.

But I’ve never made one.

A few years ago I came across this Artsy Game Incubator project that was happening in Toronto, and became interested in doing the same thing here in Tokyo. At the time, I even got in touch with the person behind it to ask permission to do it. I had even managed to find a programmer/developer who would teach the workshops, but then he decided to leave Japan, and things pretty much just died then.

About 1-2 years ago I brought this up again — probably as a question through social networks — and there was another game developer who showed interest (he worked more on the iOS side of things), but that fell through too.

Let’s do this. Again.

Recently I’ve been interested in experimenting with the Unity game engine — considering how far and wide it’s being used these days, with support coming from so many platforms. This got me thinking that it would be more interesting to learn how to do it by revisiting that workshop idea again — instead of just following tutorials all by my lonesome.

I always loved the idea behind the Artsy Game Incubator, of bringing in people who normally would never work on a game to try their hand at creating a simple one — sort of what I’ve been doing withPauseTalk, bringing people from different fields together, to talk about common ideas, problems, and solutions.

So, if you are a wiz at Unity, based in Tokyo, and would like to help non-programmers try to develop a simple game project over a period of weeks, please let me know. I already know a few other people who would be very interested in doing something like this, and I can get a space, and so now it’s just a matter of finding someone with the time and patience to lead us.

Post navigation

Previously, he was Production Coordinator at Shinra Technologies (at Eidos Montréal). Before that, he was based in Tokyo for over 15 years, where he lived and breathed design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes (he was also Executive Director at PechaKucha). He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.